


the strongest kind of fight

by illumynare



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Female Friendship, Gen, The Red War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 09:52:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21967372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illumynare/pseuds/illumynare
Summary: There used to be a Hunter who came round my family’s noodle shop all the time. (No, not *that* Hunter.)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 26





	the strongest kind of fight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CoffeeCats](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoffeeCats/gifts).



> Juri asked for "d2 campaign happenings, but from the perspective of civilians," and that is one of my favorite things to contemplate! 
> 
> The song that Irina sings is based on "[Jesse Got Trapped in a Coal Mine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COob4dyRfHg)" by Goodnight, Texas.

There used to be a Hunter who came round my family’s noodle shop all the time. 

No, not _that_ Hunter. We don’t even sell ramen! Flat rice noodles fried in soy sauce, that’s our specialty. And the Hunter who used to come round was a quiet Awoken lady, with blue skin and white hair.

Irina Sokolova, her name was. She was kind to us kids, showed us knife tricks if we asked nicely. One time she gave me a little whistle she’d carved from bone. 

“That used to be a Hive Wizard’s left thigh,” she told me, and maybe she was lying, but I still felt terribly dangerous and brave whenever I blew the whistle.

Irina, though, she wasn’t always happy. Most of the time it was just something at the back of her eyes, but some nights she’d stumble in, her shoulders slumped and eyes dull. You could see that she’d been drinking, enough to make even a Guardian drunk—and believe me; it takes a lot; I used to help out sometimes at the bar next door.

She’d take a table at the back of the restaurant, and she’d never eat, even when I brought her a plate of noodles on the house. She’d just rest her chin on clasped hands, and stare at nothing, and sometimes cry.

I asked my Pa about it once. He told me that she’d been part of the battle at the Mare Imbrium, five years before I was born.

“Never seen anything like it,” he said, shaking his head. “One night, all the streets were full of Guardians, laughing and drinking and promising Crota’s head on a pike. The next night—not a one. They were all gone to Luna.”

He sighed, looking out the window. I was ten years old, so I knew about death. But I felt still a strange shock when he said, “Most of ’em never came back. It was a slaughterhouse, they say, that day at the Mare Imbrium.”

Guardians are forever. That’s what everyone knows, growing up in the City. The same Guardian who came to your grandma’s restaurant will come to yours, not a day older.

Pa must have seen the horror on my face, because he smiled—the kind of brave smile that adults give you when they want you to be comforted—and ruffled my hair.

“It was a long time ago, sweetheart,” he told me. “Many of them did come back, just like Irina. And nobody goes to Luna now, so there won’t be any more losses. Just be kind to our Guardian, hm?”

#

_Our Guardian._

I liked the sound of that.

Here’s the thing about growing up in the City. You’re always a little jealous of Guardians, a little cowed, and a little reverent.

They wield the Traveler’s Light. They keep us safe from everything outside the walls. They live and die and live again for so many years that it’s hard for us to imagine it. And they have a power that we could never defy, even if they seldom use it.

So yeah, we tend to have pretty mixed feelings.

But after you persuade a drunken Guardian to have some dinner on the house, and watch her cry into her noodles?

You stop feeling quite so small.

When I was nineteen, I dragged Irina out of the gutter in front of our shop. I poured water on her face, and held a bucket for her as she vomited up everything she’d had that night.

“You’re a good girl, Lavinia,” she muttered at me, and I only snorted.

Pa had just died from that growth in his lungs. My older siblings were all married, and I was running the noodle-shop alone, with just a couple neighborhood boys to help me bus tables. I wasn’t happy at _all_ that I had to spend time babying the drunken Guardian I had inherited from my Pa.

“You’re not,” I told her shortly, and went out to fry another batch of noodles.

It was two in the morning when I finally closed the shop and went back upstairs to our little apartment. Irina was sitting on my bed, knees pulled up under her chin.

“I’m sorry about your Pa,” she said as soon as I came in, and I froze. She’d never acknowledged his death before.

“Awful kind of you,” I muttered, untying my apron.

“Do you want to hear a song we wrote after the Mare Imbrium?” she asked. Her glowing eyes stared into nothing.

“No,” I said shortly, but Irina ignored me and began to sing: 

_Jesse got trapped on Luna, fighting in the deep dark caves._   
_Jesse got trapped on Luna, never did marry his girl._   
_There ain't no air, and there ain't no light_   
_and there ain't no way to make it out alive._   
_His wedding was planned for the first Dawning night,_   
_But Jesse got trapped on Luna, and never did marry his girl._

_Down, down in the temple of Crota,_   
_Down, down in the regolith,_   
_Down, down on her knees she cried—_   
_My love is somewhere lost on Luna._

_Jesse got trapped on Luna, fighting in the deep dark caves._   
_Jesse got trapped on Luna, never did marry his girl._   
_She held out hope for a couple of months that he was still living somewhere,_   
_That he'd put up the strongest kind of fight,_   
_And he'd dig himself out with the Traveler’s Light,_   
_And he'd finally be free on the first Dawning night—_   
_But Jesse got trapped on Luna, and never did marry his girl._

And damn but if I didn’t start crying. Because I remembered the long months as Pa got trapped in his sickness, and how I held out hope for _so long_ that he’d find his way out again, that fighting hard and not wanting to leave me alone would be enough to keep him alive.

It wasn’t.

I was holding Irina’s hand by the end, and she had an arm thrown over my shoulders, and we were both weeping together.

Guardian or civilian, it didn’t matter. We’d both hoped so hard and lost so much.

That’s when she became _my_ Guardian, and not just my Pa’s.

#

I was twenty-six, when Ghaul came.

It was a grim and stormy evening, the sky marbled with clouds and light and shadow. I thought, _That’s pretty,_ and told Shang to get a move on prepping noodles for the night.

The first real warning was the sound of Ghaul’s missiles hitting the Tower. I didn’t know what it was then, but I knew it wasn’t thunder, wasn’t anything natural or good.

“Watch the kitchen,” I told Shang, and strode out into the street. I saw nothing, so I climbed up on the roof.

That’s when I saw flames billowing up from the Tower. That’s when I saw the ships of the Red Legion looming over the city. 

I want to say I was was the smartest, because of what I did next. Tasha at the bar next door sent all her customers home that night, and only one out of ten survived. But when I saw the fire and the smoke and the looming ships, I didn’t think. I wasn’t wise. I just remembered—

_Jesse got trapped on Luna, never did marry his girl_

—and I strode down into the restaurant.

“There’s an emergency,” I told everyone, far more calmly than I felt. “Please, don’t panic, but follow me.”

I led them all down into the basement. I gave them the sealed packets of nuts that we had saved for the Dawning festivities.

And then, as the Red Legion’s artillery began to shake the City with a slow, relentless drumbeat of despair—I went upstairs again.

There was a terrible glow in the sky. There were people darting through the streets in ragged clumps. There were the lumbering hulks of the Cabal.

When the night had faded to the pale, wishy-washy pink-blue of dawn, at last Irina came. She stumbled down the street, her gun almost falling out of her fingers, and she collapsed into my arms.

“I . . . I can’t feel the Light,” she whispered.

I’d guessed this already. There was no other reason that the City could have been taken. But still, for a horrible minute, I couldn’t breathe. All I could think was, _There ain’t no air and there ain’t no light and there ain’t no way to make it out alive._

Then I tightened my grip on her arms, and dragged her inside.

“Welcome . . . to my life,” I gasped, struggling to find my breath, and she laughed against my shoulder.

#

We weren’t among the heroes. Not the ones who got remembered, anyway.

Irina made a sniper’s nest atop my restaurant, and every one of the customers who was with us that first night made it through to the end of the war. 

This was partly because of the supply runs I made, defying Ghaul to snatch eggs and biscuit-mix and cheese from under his nose. And it was partly because of Shang, and the news he brought in through his unlicensed ham radio. And it was partly because of the relentless watch that Irina kept.

We all of us brought each other through the nights.

We weren’t part of the final campaign to defeat Ghaul and retake the City. That was fine, and lucky, and also unfair. We’d saved everyone we set out to protect, and weren’t going to be remembered for it. (But we got to remember that we’d saved them.)

When the Traveler glowed above us again, cheering started in the streets, I smiled at Irina—oh, she’d seen too little joy in her long, long life—

And she smiled back at me, with a light I’d never seen yet, even before the Traveler died.

“Hey,” I said to her that evening, clinking my glass against hers, “we’re finally free on the first Dawning night, aren’t we?”

And we laughed and cried together.


End file.
